1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for archiving information. More particularly, the present invention pertains to design and implementation of a method and apparatus for recreating placeholders from objects of information, such as files and/or emails, stored in an archive.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many computer users have large amounts of data which they do not use frequently and do not need immediate access to such infrequently used data. Consequently, such data may be considered as archivable data.
In most cases, there are three phases (or states) associated with any archivable data: online, archived and intermediate. The online state comes into existence when data is available online for fast processing (i.e., access, retrieval and the like from a storage that is directly accessible by the users' computer). On the other hand, when in the archived state, the data is moved to secondary storage such that access to the data results in a delay (i.e., a search of the archive is performed to find the archived file).
Further, when in the intermediate state, the data is moved to a secondary storage, where in the intermediate state, a stub (frequently referred to as placeholder, skeleton, proxy or surrogate) corresponding to the data is present on the primary (or online) storage thereby facilitating simple retrieval of the data, however with some latency. Specifically, a stub may contain basic information to identify the data and also include information indicating the location of the data on the secondary storage device. Thus, a user selects the placeholder and the file represented by the placeholder is retrieved from the secondary storage.
Currently, if a computer crashes, the placeholders are lost and the archived files must be restored to the computer and then re-archived to regenerate the placeholders. Such a process is very time consuming.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for recreating placeholders for objects of information without restoring the archived files.